Last night I had a worse-than-standard "teaching anxiety" dream: I dreamed I was reading my students' course evaluations, and all their comments were not only negative, but horribly detailed. One said something like "We could tell she'd read a lot about Lacan [not that I've ever taught Lacan], but this class was, on the whole, not a very good idea." Another comment criticized my posture, my body language, the state of my teeth, and my smile, which was described as a "grimace."
Even worse, I was somehow reading these evaluations on the web, using my laptop, and I was in the classroom at the time with the students in question, which gave me a sudden flash of guilty panic: Oh my God, I shouldn't be reading these yet, the course isn't over!
It was awful. I'm knocking back coffee in a slightly frantic effort to wake all the way up. At the same time, though, I remember a certain feeling of grim triumph in the dream: here's the proof, I thought to myself, looking at the evaluations, that I've got to change careers. If anyone asks why I want to leave teaching, I can just show them these comments, and they'll have to agree with my decision.
All the same, I'd rather go back to dreaming my standard-issue bizarro dreams, like the one two nights ago in which I went to see the movie 28 Days Later at the movie theater (I've never seen it) and then somehow I was in the movie itself, plotting ways to flee from the killer zombies. Somehow, my unconscious grasps the distinction between fact and fiction, because the movie-zombie dream was much less scary than the evaluation dream.
Ugh. What a most un-fun dream! My own teaching/student anxiety dreams always centered on being late and unable to find where the class was being held. Oddly, though, after one string of them I actually learned my way around the dream college -- at which point they stopped. Maybe you'll dream of leaving teaching! Or evaluating the students! :)
Posted by: Rana | December 11, 2003 at 01:27 AM
Repetitive vividness in dreams can be downright scary. I had a serious stream of them for a while and it became quite unnerving. I read it could be a side effect of Vitamin B12 (or something in the complex) build-up, which I was taking at the time. Interesting that even in the dream, you were working it out that this was evidence that you should get out of teaching.
Posted by: Michelle | December 11, 2003 at 11:30 AM